The student organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is prominent on many college campuses, preaching a mantra of “Freeing Palestine.” It masquerades as though it were a civil rights group when it is not. Indeed, as an African-American, I am highly insulted that my people’s legacy is being pilfered for such a repugnant agenda. It is thus high time to expose its agenda and lay bare some of the fallacies they peddle.

• If you seek to promulgate the legacy of early Islamic colonialists who raped and pillaged the Middle East, subjugated the indigenous peoples living in the region, and foisted upon them a life of persecution and degradation—you do not get to claim the title of “Freedom Fighter.”

• If you support a racist doctrine of Arab supremacism and wish (as a corollary of that doctrine) to destroy the Jewish state, you do not get to claim that the prejudices you peddle are forms of legitimate “resistance.”

"When the Nazis came for the communists, I did not speak out; As I was not a communist.When they locked up the social democrats, I did not speak out; I was not a social democrat.When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; As I was not a trade unionist.When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; As I was not a Jew.When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out."- Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984

The European Union fined eight financial institutions a combined total of $2.3 billion over their alleged role in the manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). The manipulation of LIBOR is one of the largest banking scandals of our time. According to the Economist, when the rate is manipulated, it affects payments for more than $800 trillion of financial instruments and 99 percent of all commercial products including mortgages, credit cards and pensions, as reported by CNN. Five other financial institutions, including Barclays, R.B.S. and UBS, have paid more than $3 billion combined to regulators in the United States, Britain and Switzerland over the manipulation of the LIBOR rate.

As U.S. corporate profits soar to record highs, food stamps for the neediest were quietly cut. The politicians who are demanding endless cuts to social programs — Democrats and Republicans alike — insist that the U.S. is broke, all the while conveniently ignoring the mountains of tax-free wealth piling up in the pockets of the super rich.

This newest flood of cash for the nation’s wealthiest 1% is a blatant government subsidy: the Federal Reserve continues to pump out an extra $75 billion a month, the vast majority of which fattens the already bursting overseas bank accounts of the rich. Since Obama has been president this pro-corporate policy has helped funnel 95 percent of the nation’s new income to the wealth-soaked rich.

And while it’s true that the global super rich have an estimated $32 trillion [!] stashed away abroad in off shore tax havens, an even newer way to avoid taxes has gripped the endlessly-greedy minds of U.S.-based billionaires.

In one of comedian Chris Rock’s routines, he observes: “You know what that means when someone pays you a minimum wage? You know what your boss is trying to say? ‘Hey, if I could pay you less, I would, but it’s against the law.’”

The humor works because, like the boy who cried “the king has no clothes,” Rock is stating something obvious which mostly goes unspoken: that if it wasn’t for such laws as the minimum wage, established to appease the militant mass workers’ struggles in the 1930s, bosses would reduce workers’ wages and benefits to near zero.

This is because workers’ wages come, naturally, at the expense of their bosses’ profits. Since bosses are in business to make as much profit as possible, they are compelled to cheat their workers out of every dime their labor creates, within the limits of the law.

The Saudis and Israelis are fuming. Obama’s talks with Iran’s new President Hassan Rouhani point to a possible new direction in U.S.-Middle East policy. Iran is the regional archrival of the Saudis and Israelis, who for decades have shared the mantle as the main U.S. allies in the Middle East.

The Arab Spring has — along with the ascendance of Russia and China — shifted the geo-political ground of the region, and the U.S. is trying to maintain a dominant position with a new strategy. This shift, if successful, has the potential to create a political crisis within the U.S. government as well as abroad. Israel and Saudi Arabia, for example, won’t quietly accept a diminished role in the Middle East.

The Oregon Business Association (OBA) held its annual Statesman Dinner on October 17 to honor the Statesman of the Year. The event was fraught with anomalies, not least of which was the fact that the award went to Sue Levin, the Executive Director of Stand for Children Oregon.

According to the OBA website, while Levin is acknowledged as a woman–a stateswoman to be precise–she still had to make due with receiving the Statesman of the Year award. It was nonetheless, from the OBA’s perspective, a proper and well-deserved award. After all, Stand for Children works tirelessly to turn the public education system into a cash cow for private interests, as one would expect from an organization whose major funders include the Walton Family (of Wal-Mart fame) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Jeremy Scahill, reporter for such outlets as The Nation and Democracy Now, has come out with the most hard hitting documentary of recent years entitled, “Dirty Wars.” He takes us around the globe from Afghanistan to Yemen and Somalia documenting the crimes of U.S imperialistic foreign policy in tragic detail.

The documentary starts off in Gardez, Afghanistan, where a night raid by strange-looking, long-bearded American troops ends up in the butchery of a family, one of the targets being an American-trained Afghan policeman. To cover up their tracks the secretive American troops extract the bullets from the dead bodies with knives. The villagers refer to the mysterious killers as “the American Taliban.”